


Thawing

by clefairytea



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, Post-Apocalypse, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 20:03:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8070838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clefairytea/pseuds/clefairytea
Summary: “You probably do not think this is cruel,” GLaDOS says suddenly, not taking her gaze from the mouse for a second, “After all, you have such enormous capacity for cruelty, I doubt you can recognise mistreatment even when it is right before your eyes. However, a normal human with basic abilities of empathy, love, and compassion, would correctly identify my treatment of this animal as cruel.”Chell says nothing.“However, if this experiment were to be submitted to an ethics committee, it would receive full approval. Cruelty, in and of itself, is not wholly banned in science, after all. It is simply needless cruelty, the kind you excel in, that is not permitted. What I am doing is necessary for testing conditions. What I do is the only way for knowledge to progress.”--Chell, GLaDOS, and the end of the world.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Playing fast and loose with what the world is like in the Portal/Half Life canon, for the sake of exploring a weirdly homoerotic relationship between a deranged AI and an outrageously stubborn human. What can I say, I have very specific interests.
> 
> Content warnings for GLaDOS being...herself, animal abuse, animal death, implied suicide.

 It doesn’t take Chell long to realise that she is being watched. There are footsteps, faint, only just out of tune with her own. At night, settling into camp, she catches a glimpse of an amber light between the trees, a rigid silhouette disappearing out of view, mechanical footsteps in the fallen leaves.

The issue is not so much that Chell knows, it’s that she knows she’s meant to know. If who is following her is who she thinks it is, those were clumsy mistakes. Too clumsy, all things considered, to be anything other than completely purposeful.

Chell falls back on her usual tactic; she completely ignores her.

Yet the more Chell ignores her, the more obvious she becomes. The mistakes become more frequent, more obviously clumsy. Chell glimpses a shadow over her as she wakes, a figure that disappears as soon as she sits upright. During her latest attempt at hunting, the leaves crunch a foot step behind her, a rock hits the trunk of the tree, and the deer Chell had been tracking skips off into the trees.

One morning, Chell wakes with a dead bird splayed across her chest one morning, the feathers scattered across her narrow hiding place, the poor creature’s neck twisted, beak open, showing the nub of a tongue. A love letter from a lunatic.

She plucks the bird and roasts it over the fire, picking the meat from its bones and licking the juices from her filthy fingers. She can practically feel her voyeur shudder with contempt, hidden somewhere, desperate for Chell to react. Chell refuses to give her the remotest satisfaction.

On the tenth day, Chell walks to a creek and crouches over it, conscious of the unseen eye over her. She catches water in the cup of her palms and washes her face, and neck, runs her damp fingers through her hair, trying to comb loose the matted tangles, with little success

Her orange jumpsuit is fraying at the seams, her tank top tooth-yellow with sweat and dirt. Even the Companion Cube is filthy at this point. She kneels in the dirt and rubs water up her arms.

Civilisation can’t be far. She has been walking for so long, she has to reach some human settlement sooner or later. She just has to keep going.

 _“You look terrible, you know._ ”

Chell doesn’t turn, doesn’t even flinch.

_“Please bear in mind that I mean that comparatively – you have always looked terrible. Your physical appearance was consistently rated among the lowest of all human testing subjects in the facility. And below many of the animal testing subjects as well.”_

A shadow on her back, one Chell had always known would catch up to her eventually.

“ _However, you have dropped even below your usual appalling standards. I note this only because it reflects your poor health, and your lack of consistent self-care.”_

Chell closes her eyes for a moment, and then turns, her pistol drawn and her finger already curled around the trigger, ready to pull the mechanism.

The robot looks at her. It’s a simpler machine than Chell envisioned – not too different from the robots she’d seen when GLaDOS had pulled her back from the moon. A little taller, and slimmer, perhaps, GLaDOS had always had a bit of an unreasonable fixation on weight. Otherwise, though, exactly like the other robots at Aperture. Funny, Chell had always imagined GLaDOS would favour something more humanoid. Something that would satisfy what she imagined to be GLaDOS’s natural vanity. Perhaps she'd overestimated GLaDOS's vanity, projected it onto her because of some kind of unaddressed internalised misogyny. Or, perhaps, GLaDOS found the shapes of the human body distasteful, even repulsive.

GLaDOS observes the gun in Chell’s hand with scorn.

Chell can see why. It’s an ugly, unsophisticated machine, a crude hunk of black metal. To GLaDOS, it likely seems like some distant, embarrassing cousin, the sort she would hesitate to even make smalltalk with at a family barbecue. Chell scavenged it from a dead soldier, slumped in the front seat of some kind of destroyed military vehicle.

It may not be pretty, or advanced, but it did what Chell needed it to do. She didn’t need a portal gun any more, she needed to be able to hunt meat and defend herself against predators. She holds her stance, noting weak points in GLaDOS’s body, where joints and wires are exposed, tumours of wiring that, if impacted, may blow the whole structure to pieces.

“ _You can kill this body if you must – I knew that your natural murderous instincts may take hold – but it doesn’t matter. This is only an extension of Aperture. It would be like if I cut off your pinkie toe. Painful and somewhat inconvenient, but ultimately neither here nor there,_ ” GLaDOS says, and then adds, smugly, “ _And I’ve done that, by the way. Cut off your pinkie toe. You likely didn’t n otice. Since I had you spliced with amphibian DNA while you were sleeping, it simply grew back. If you look closely, you may notice the difference in skin tone. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”_

Chell knows better than to listen to any of her taunts. At best, they were utter nonsense. At worst, they were barely veiled threats. She was more than confident in her ability to deal with either.

She returns her gun to its holster and stands up, wiping water from her face with the back of her palm. Tugging a hair tie from her wrist, she scrapes her hair back up into its usual ponytail. GLaDOS watches her, simmering at being ignored.

Chell had never thought much about the other test subjects before her, but she suspects that most  had been talkative. Always pleading with her, bargaining for freedom, screaming insults and threats, or simply, desperately, asking for tips – GLaDOS, sadist she was, had likely relished every last word.

Chell had chosen silence only as a quick and easy route of resistance. She had never imagined it would infuriate her captor as much as it did.

 _“Oh, deciding against violence? How very unlike you._ ”

Chell picks the Companion Cube back up.

_“Still carrying that around? It’s not sentient, you know. Your affection is misplaced. And dangerous. For the Companion Cube, I mean. You have an unfortunate habit of murdering your friends.”_

She continues to walk again, not looking back at GLaDOS. After a moment of silence, Chell hears footsteps crunching through the undergrowth behind her, and sees a shadow walking alongside her own.

 

Chell almost expects GLaDOS to get bored and leave after a few days. Life on the surface, after all, doesn’t have the quick excitement of watching test subjects flail for their lives in elaborately constructed chambers. The outside world, Chell has discovered, is a silent place. Chell manages to scavenge joy in tiny places; the dappled sunlight falling through branches, the soft prints of some unseen animal in the undergrowth, the feeling of waking up to the warm sun peeking through the narrow slit of her hiding place. Nothing that a mad, science-obsessed AI would ever appreciate, or even understand.

Yet, despite Chell’s continued silence, and the resounding silence of the world around them, GLaDOS shows no sign of leaving. She follows Chell like a shadow, relentlessly talking and cajoling and questioning.

When Chell sleeps, she expects to have to snap awake to the hiss of neurotoxins released through some previously unseen port, or have to scramble through some hastily made puzzle to keep her freedom. Sometimes, all she can think about is waking up in the relaxation chamber again, and the thought keeps her awake, lying rigid under the stars.

For all her fears, she wakes every morning to GLaDOS still and silent, standing a few feet away from whatever hiding place Chell had managed to carve for herself, watching her with an intensity that made Chell certain that she had been watching her _all night._

Chell never acknowledges her in the morning, simply packs up her things, puts the Companion Cube under her arm, and begins to walk again.

 _“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?_ ” GLaDOS blurts out, finally. It’s obvious she’s been desperate for Chell to ask. Or at least indicate some interest in it – a lingering gaze, a raised eyebrow, anything. Chell denies her all of them, and keeps walking, lips pressed together in an obstinate line.

 _“You know, such utter lack of curiosity is really quite contemptible in a human. Curiousity is your species’s sole saving grace. And yet you seem strangely bereft of it. Perhaps you haven’t quite caught up to the rest of human evolution,”_ GLaDOS comments, “ _Or it’s the brain damage. You are, after all, possibly brain damaged. That moron may have been uncharacteristically accurate in that assessment._ ”

It is beginning to get dark. Chell begins to do the nightly chore of setting up camp – setting up the campfire materials she’d been carrying, gathering anything else, and unrolling the blanket she’d scavenged from the body of some less-fortunate traveller. She warms two cans of food over the fire – kidney beans swimming in watery sauce, meatballs in a swampy red substance that, at some point, had been tomato sauce, scraping out of the tin with the pads of her fingers, and, draining every last drop of the liquid.

She leaves the fire one and wraps her blanket around herself, watching the flames flicker as her eyelids droop.

 _“Ah. Sleep. Yes. I’m surprised you attend so well to that little biological imperative. After all, a decent exercise regime is equally as necessary for good health, and you seem strangely averse to that_.”

Previously, she would have never slept in the open. Wild animals had no stake in the near-extinction of the human race – if a bear stumbled across her, she’d become a quick suppertime snack, regardless of her endangered status.

The useful thing, however, about a travelling companion who wanted to kill you herself was that she would do everything in her power to stop anything else killing you. After all, why let anything else have the satisfaction.

Chell turns on her side and closes her eyes, hands tucked under her cheek to provide a makeshift pillow, one grown bony with malnourishment, and rough with scarring.

 _“…Fine. Good night_.”

 

Eventually, the forest clears, and in the rolling hills emerge stretches of farmland, a patchwork quilt of browns and greens under a cloudless sky. Yet when Chell looks closely, it becomes apparent that the neatly arranged squares are bleeding into one another, nature tearing apart the fences separating them, joining together against after however many years humans had managed to keep them divided.

Maybe there’d still be vegetables growing in some of them.

Chell’s stomach rumbles.

 _“Again? Really?_ ” GLaDOS says, looking critically at Chell’s concave belly, “ _Your appetite for sustenance is almost as insatiable as your appetite for violence. Neither are particularly flattering features, may I add._ ”

The farm has not been attended to in a very long time – a tractor lays dusty and overgrown in the centre of a field, most of the engine pulled apart for scraps. The livestock were either long dead or long escaped, their pastures overgrown and their fences rotten away. Walking through the fields, though, Chell scavenges onions and potatoes, even finds a cabbage, only slightly eaten by the birds.

 _“I’m not sure what you’re hoping to find. It’s empty up here. And I never had much taste for the surface world even when it was populated. Chaotic. Asinine. Populated solely, it seems, by destructive morons. Come to think of it, you probably would have fit right in._ ”

Chell clambers over a fence and into the next field, and then takes a second to look out across it, holding her breath in her throat. The field is full of flowers. Not in neat, pre-arranged rows, as humans would grow them, but wild bursts of colour, bursting through the grass in spirals. For a second, Chell feels something well in her chest but, conscious of GLaDOS’s gaze, bites it back.

She crouches to look at the nearest flowers - little white and magenta blooms with twisted petals, on thin tawny stems. Chell gently grazes her fingers over the petals, feeling them delicate and soft beneath her, like a soft stretch of flesh.

“ _Cyclamen hederifolium. Toxic, but, unfortunately, not to humans_.”

Moving on, Chell stoops to inspect a few drooping white flowers, their heads turned down as if in mourning, a pale pistil drooping from a maroon star in the centre of their petals. Gloomy little things drooping on pale stems. They look like depressed fairies.

 _“Gladiolus murielae_ ,” GLaDOS says, flatly, as if she can’t help but provide information. Whether that's programming or personality, Chell couldn't even begin to guess. “ _Is this really a good use of your time?”_

They’re lovely, but Chell can’t quite bring herself to pick one. Instead, she picks up one that has already fallen loose, a little head of petals and a broken neck. She tucks it carefully into the folds of her jumpsuit.

 _“You’re being slow just to irritate me, aren’t you? I feel like I should tell you, just so you don’t waste your own time - it won’t work. I’m very, very busy down here, after all. This little body following you about it is barely significant to me at all_ ,” GLaDOS says, _“I have so very much to do down here, with all my new test subjects and the many, many experiments I’m running, that honestly, I’m barely paying any attention to your inanities. It likely makes you wonder why I’m here at all, surely._ ”

Chell keeps walking, parting the overgrown grass and flowers, looking for a suitable shelter to settle down to eat and sleep. Quickly, she identifies a dilapidated barn, sagging under the weight of overgrown flowers, the doors long rotten away. Chell enters, and settles cross-legged onto the floor, giving herself a moment to rest before she sets up camp.

“ _This is your life now, is it? Walk, walk, to who knows where, build a fire, consume yet more unnecessary calories, and then pass out and prepare to do the whole thing again tomorrow,”_ GLaDOS says, “ _That’s the freedom you murdered me twice for? It really seems like it was worth it._ ”

Chell runs her finger on the flower tucked into her clothes.

_“To clarify, that was sarcasm.”_

Chell shrugs one shoulder. Better than testing, better than hurling herself across test chambers, desperately attempting not to choke down too much neurotoxin, scrambling to solve some puzzle before she choked to death. Better than breathing the same room full of air for the rest of her life.

Of course, she can’t expect GLaDOS to understand that.

With an unnecessarily loud, long-suffering sigh, GLaDOS leaves the barn and goes to wander the fields. Chell isn’t stupid enough to think that that might be her giving up and leaving.

 

After a few hours sleep, Chell steps out of the barn, stretching in the cool morning air. As she expects, GLaDOS is still there, foraging in the field, the robot bent as far as its stiff body would allow. As Chell moves closer, she stands upright, hand clenched around something – a field mouse, unmoving in her grasp, whiskers twitching.

GLaDOS looks at her, knowing Chell can see the mouse, daring her to ask. Chell folds her arms, jutting her chin to the side as though nothing GLaDOS does is of the slightest interest to her. That irritates her best, after all.

In response, GLaDOS also acts as though she hasn’t noticed that Chell has noticed and is pretending she hasn’t noticed. She moves briskly past Chell, as though she were a faceless Aperture co-worker, to something behind her – a construction, build up on flattened grass. She lowers the mouse into it.

A maze, Chell realises. Braided from grass and the stems of gladiolus and cyclamen flowers, the bright colours and shapes of the flowers popping out against the pale brown and green. To the mouse, it must be a towering, impregnable fortress.

It’s a beautiful, elaborate piece of work, despite the awful feeling of pressure rising in Chell's chest just looking at it. GLaDOS must have been working on it the entire time Chell was asleep.

GLaDOS says nothing, for once, and then leans forward to place a fistful of purple-black berries at the centre of the maze. She shows one berry to the mouse, watches it perk up, whiskers twitching, and then she takes it away.

The mouse begins to move through the maze, occasionally stopping at intersections to stand upright, sniffing, the black beads of its eyes glinting. Chell has to admit, it’s mesmerising to watch. She can see the tiny animal’s limited cognitive abilities being strained, watching it try and fail and try and fail, sometimes trying the same thing twice. It’s a little funny, a little frustrating, and a little sad. Yet she can’t help but cheer it on.

Finally, the mouse reaches the centre of the maze, and Chell wants to cheer for it. It moves towards the berries, reaching out one tiny paw.

GLaDOS seizes it by the tail, and pulls it out of the maze. It thrashes, eyes bugging out of its tiny skull, and then lies limp, accepting its fate lies in the whims of a huge, incomprehensible creature.

Chell can’t understand that. Why would anything ever just submit?

GLaDOS places it back in the maze, the same starting point. For a second, it doesn’t move and Chell finds herself almost mouthing words of encouragement, and presses her lips even more tightly closed.

The mouse begins the maze again, but this time GLaDOS does not sit and watch passively. She pushes the mouse down different turns, presses her finger down on its tail and watches it writhe for a second, blocks off entrances and flicks it with her fingers, sadistic little maneuverers that, Chell sees, moves it closer and closer to the berries at the centre every time.

It makes Chell sick to her stomach, but it is, she has to admit, still fascinating to watch.

 _“You probably do not think this is cruel,”_ GLaDOS says suddenly, not taking her gaze from the mouse for a second _, “After all, you have such enormous capacity for cruelty, I doubt you can recognise mistreatment even when it is right before your eyes. However, a normal human with basic abilities of empathy, love, and compassion, would correctly identify my treatment of this animal as cruel_.”

Chell says nothing.

_“However, if this experiment were to be submitted to an ethics committee, it would receive full approval. Cruelty, in and of itself, is not wholly banned in science, after all. It is simply needless cruelty, the kind you excel in, that is not permitted. What I am doing is necessary for testing conditions. What I do is the only way for knowledge to progress.”_

The mouse stops, and begins to groom itself, paws working frantically through its fur. GLaDOS leans down and swats it, hard enough to make it roll onto its side. GLaDOS’s hand remains looming by it, a stern warning, and the mouse begins to move again.

 _“A good scientist inflicts the least possible suffering necessary to test the hypothesis under observation_. _However, some things cannot be studied without sacrifice. Without that minimal level of pain and suffering and cruelty. A good scientist knows this, and does what must be done. She minimises the pain, minimises the risk, and learns to stomach the protests of the soft-hearted._ ”

The mouse tries to burrow through the grass below it, and then through the maze walls. Nothing works, GLaDOS has made the maze impenetrable to anything apart from its solution. The mouse continues to move.

Finally, the mouse reaches the centre, bullied and coerced by GLaDOS the right way, its tiny ears twitching and grooming itself, habitually, a tiny bare patch of flesh already beginning to show on its neck.

Chell expects GLaDOS to pull it away again, but she doesn’t. The mouse, all nervy twitches and tiny, thrumming heart, reaches the centre and finally manages to get its little paws on a berry. It eats it, voracious with gratitude, the trauma of the past hour forgotten.

 _“And here is where we test the main hypothesis_.”

GLaDOS waits for the mouse to finish, and then extends a finger into the maze, holding it before the mouse, but not touching it. The mouse looks at it, frozen. GLaDOS and the mouse remain in this limbo for what Chell estimates are five full minutes. It feels so much longer.

Finally, she moves her finger away, apparently satisfied.

 _“This is my sixtieth trial of this particular experiment. So far, no subject has attempted to attack me for simply trying to help it_.”

Chell bristles.

GLaDOS picks up the mouse in one hand, and the berries with the other, and Chell wants to dive forward, seize GLaDOS’s arm before she can choke the life out of the animal.

Instead, GLaDOS walks a few steps away and carefully sets down the berries, and then the mouse, with nothing but gentleness. She turns and looks at her, observing the expression on Chell’s face.

 _“What were you expecting?_ ”

Chell decides it’s time to get moving.

 

Chell isn’t sure what she’s looking at. They have stumbled across what looked to be an old farm, or perhaps a laboratory. The main building is rustic, decorated like an old restaurant, with heavy wooden tables and chairs, gathering cobwebs and dust. In the basement, there are huge metal vats and wooden barrels, rotting with disuse. It looks almost like some kind of bizarre chemistry set.

Outside, fields full of strange plants in long, neat lines, growing against wooden structures. Chell inspects one, and finds that among the leaves there were fruits, like plump little beads, either in pale green or violet.

“ _A vineyard_ ,” GLaDOS notes, “ _Where they used to grow grapes and make wine_. _An alcoholic drink often paired with meals. The wine-making process was highly delicate and complex, a science in and of itself. Accordingly, excellent wine was often expensive, and highly sought after by humans with a refined palette. Undoubtedly, we are standing above hundreds of dollars worth of wine, perhaps some of which was considered highly rare and valuable. Not that it matters. Not now.”_

Chell squeezes a grape between her fingers until it bursts. Absently, she wipes the juice on her jumpsuit.

_“It’s funny, isn’t it? Humans created these notions of value and luxury and class, but they have never been real. Simply labels, used to distinguish one particular sort of alcoholic grape juice from the next. Yet treated as immutable fact, considered of absolute importance in their fleeting little lives. You all considered yourselves, and all of these decisions you made about the world, so important. So...concrete.”_

Chell plucks another grape from the vine, half-hidden under foliage, and pops it into her mouth. Her teeth break through the skin, and the tart flavour washes over her tongue. She closes her eyes and lets it spread across her mouth before she swallows.

“ _I see my conversation is wasted on you. As always._ ”

Chell crams a handful of grapes into her mouth at once.

“ _You have no idea how difficult it is being the only intelligent being in this wasteland._ ”

Chell returns to the farmhouse and sets to work. There was bound to be useful materials and equipment – tools that she could use to defend herself, cut away branches, trap animals. She couldn’t carry much, expending most of her effort on carrying the Companion Cube, but Chell isn’t about to let a good scavenging spot go to waste. GLaDOS watches her, her distaste evident. . For Chell in particular, or for humanity in general, Chell can never tell. Perhaps GLaDOS sees Chell as simply an avatar of all of humanity, or perhaps Chell has just managed to very personally piss her off. She doesn’t really care either way.

They walk out through the restaurant. Chell has little memory of restaurants – some vague memories of sitting with her parents, the two of them eating some complicated platter with roasted fish and kale, Chell dipping chicken nuggets in red mounds of ketchup. After the Bring Your Daughter to Work Day massacre, everything had become a blur. Survival, invasion, seclusion, detention, defiance, strung together only by her own bitter, unyielding drive to keep going.

“ _I suppose they did tastings in here,_ ” GLaDOS says, voice flat, _“There is a kitchen below. They must have served food as well._ ”

Chell continues to investigate the area. GLaDOS follows her all the while, continuing to talk in that flat, bored voice, as though Chell had forced her to come here, and GLaDOS was only begrudgingly indulging her eccentricities.

 _“It is sometimes interesting to consider how a scenario may have unfolded if the situation was different, say in an alternate reality. For instance, imagine an alternate reality in which I was human. And, this is more difficult to imagine, so bear with me here, but say you were also human_ ,” GLaDOS says, tracing a line in the dust on one table, “ _Say the world hadn’t ended. Say we knew each other, as those humans. Say we both had a taste for fine wines. Could you imagine, if the situation had been so thoroughly different, we had ended up here, in this moment in time, drinking wine together? Imagine, some other world all around us, invisible. Perhaps those versions of us are seated at that table there, by the window. We are laughing over nibbles and discussing the pinot noir. Imagine those other versions of us. Those women cannot see us, the mute lunatic with the violent impulses, the scientist thrust into a machine. They are laughing. They are happy. Neither of them have ever been murdered. Or tried to murder anybody else.”_

Looking around, Chell concludes that she has found everything there is to find in this place.

 _“I just thought that was an interesting thought experiment,_ ” GLaDOS says, with dull finality, _“However, alternate dimensions do not exist. This is scientifically proven fact. They do not exist. These hypothetical people we imagined are not real, would never be real. We are solely what we are. We are solely this awful, monstrous what we are._ ”

Chell leaves.

 

It isn’t long until the snow begins to fall. Gently, at first, clouds of icy, ethereal dust that rest on the ground for seconds before simmering away. Chell zips up her jumpsuit, tucking her arms into the tattered sleeve. Just a step behind her, GLaDOS stops and looks up, letting snowflakes land on her. They melt instantly against her shell.

Chell wonders if this is the first time GLaDOS has experienced snow. She's likely seen it, through the cameras attached to the Aperture entrances, but Chell can't imagine her every feeling it falling down on her.

For once, GLaDOS says nothing.

As they walk, the snow begins to pile around them, crystallising in Chell’s hair. Chell looks at her bare hands, fingertips already prickling with the cold. She needs to find new clothes.

“ _What are you even planning to do, long-term? Just walk and walk until you drop dead?_ ” GLaDOS asks.

Chell unrolls her sleeves and tugs them over her hands as far as they will go, curling her fingers up to fit them beneath the fabric. She should leave behind the Companion Cube. She knows it’s doing nothing but slowing her down. That weight could be extra food and water, more important supplies. It is absurd, and yet, the thought of leaving it makes Chell feel sick.

“ _You might find it interesting to know that I have recently installed hot chocolate machines in the Enrichment Centre. They make it fresh with real dark Belgian chocolate, steamed milk, topped with whipped cream and marshmallows. If you were here, I’d even add some chocolate shavings,”_ she says, and then, looking Chell up and down, adds, “ _Despite how little you need the extra calories.”_

Shading her eyes from the snow, Chell looks out over the horizon. Nothing but wilderness, stretching out into the jagged lines of distant mountains and the curve of endless hills. The horizon is becoming more blurred with fog and snow every day.

Thinking carefully, she notes a dark line in the distance, long road curving into a crumbling elbow of granite and tarmac. A highway was a good a waypoint as anything. A road would always lead to civilisation, eventually.

Chell breathes on her fingers, rubs them together, and heads towards it.

 _“I’m having a cup right now. It is a wonderful indulgence. Particularly when enjoyed against this beautiful snowfall and your impending hypothermia._ ”

 

As the night sets in, Chell’s breath begins to crystallise against the air, and her fingers burn. On the highway, she comes across the skeleton of a forgotten pick-up truck, half-rusting into the ground, most of it already torn apart like a carcass left to the vultures.

She scrapes away the ice and rust with her fingernails and wrenches the door open, triggering an explosion of dust. She slaps a hand over her mouth, coughing silently into her palm.

The seat is threadbare, the cabin tiny and barely sheltered, the windshield and windows having long been shattered. Chell sets the Companion Cube in the back of the truck, silently promising she wouldn’t leave it behind, and then crawls into the front seat.

At the doorway, GLaDOS stares at her as she wraps her blanket around herself, huddling into it. She should light a fire, warm herself by it, but her arms and legs ache, muscle-deep, from the day’s walking, and she has run out of firewood besides. The best she can do is hunker in the shelter until the snow passes, and do her best to stay awake.

Or, she would crouch in the cold and slowly freeze to death. That was possible, but Chell didn’t see the point in even entertaining the thought.

GLaDOS shakes her head – or her whole body, to be more accurate. She was only a white thorax, an eye, and a set of mechanical limbs, after all.

“ _So this is your grand plan for survival? I would call you a madwoman, but that would be a grievous insult to all the good madwomen out there, doing things such as not wandering around in the snow in nothing but a tacky jumpsuit and leg braces._ ”

She can’t shut the door with GLaDOS standing there, but moving her out of the way would involve acknowledging her existence. Frankly, she’d rather just freeze to death.

Chell wraps her hands around her feet, rubbing, urging her blood to keep flowing, no matter how tired she is, no matter the cold.

_“You may find it interesting to know that you are current above Testing Chamber C-16. It is a personal favourite of mine. You never got the chance to try it. It’s a shame. There was a slide in it. And a ballpit.”_

Chell continues to rub her feet, and then her ankles, trying to keep her blood flowing. Pins and needles prickle her skin, and a cold wind blusters through the door GLaDOS is, stubbornly, forcing her to keep open. She shivers, almost gasps, but catches the noise in her teeth before it escapes.

“ _You haven’t walked that far, you know. You could still return to your relaxation chamber._ _An Aperture Science Secret Elevator Shaft is only fifteen minutes from here_. _If you left now, I could have hot chocolate and a bowl of soup waiting for you on arrival. Today’s flavour is minestrone._ ”

Chell wraps the blanket around herself, as many times and as tightly as she can, and brings her knees up to her chest, curling her fingers and toes inwards. Another sharp wind blows through, and Chell sinks down, trying to at least avoid the window above the driver’s seat, even if GLaDOS insists on keeping the door open.

“ _…In fact, today’s flavour could be anything you like. After all, I prepare it. Tell me, do you have a favourite?_ ”

She turns her head away, fixing her gaze on the car door – the handle to open it, the little knob under the window that indicated whether it was locked or unlocked, a button to wind the window up and down. She memorises all those details, visualises how the mechanisms work beneath the metal, constructing a blueprint in her mind. She needs to keep her mind working just as much as she needs to keep her body working. Chell has always been good at visualisation.

“ _Oh honestly._ ”

Chell feels a weight press in next to her, and hears the door slam shut. She can hear the whirr of machinery keeping GLaDOS’s body operational, keeping it warm against the biting cold, and feel the heat radiating from it.

If Chell doesn’t look at her, if ignores the noise of fans whirring, she can almost pretend it’s the warmth of a human body.

It is less difficult than she expects. After all, Chell can’t remember what another living human feels like any more.

“ _It is fortunate for you that I’m a better, and more forgiving person than you are._ ”

It is fortunate, Chell thinks, that GLaDOS can’t stand the idea of the elements succeeding where she failed.

Chell turns to look at GLaDOS crouched awkwardly in the seat beside her, and then turns away again. In silence, they watch the snow fall.

 

Along the highway, Chell has her first stroke of luck in what feels like years. By the side of the road, an old house. Potentially a farmhouse, but the snow has fallen too thick to tell what the surrounding area used to be. All she knows is that it has an intact roof, most of its walls, and a door with a lock that Chell easily manages to pick (“ _Ah, skills commonly associated with a criminal background_. _I’m not surprised._ ”).

Chell walks along a hallway into a large, rustic living room, shattered glass and shapeless debris crunching under her feet. Although mostly intact, the house still looks as though a bomb has went off inside it.

It was likely once a cosy family living room. The fireplace is blackened and piled high with ash, but seems perfectly functional. By that, a sofa, and a squashy armchair. Despite the fact they were disgustingly tattered and dirty, they were the most inviting things Chell has ever seen. Something squeaks underfoot, and Chell looks down to see a little rubber toy, so filthy she can’t even tell what it was meant to be. It looked like something that may have once belonged to a dog. Or a very small child.

The kitchen, aside from the rats and the smell of rot, also boasts an old-fashioned stove, one that could possibly be persuaded to work with some ingenuity. Cupboards, with some tins that look like they could be salvaged. A small, empty pantry. Pots, pans, cutlery, tools that could be used for cooking or persuaded into carpentry, or to make traps for animals.

Carefully ascending the partially destroyed stairs, Chell discovers two bedrooms, one small with a destroyed bed, and glow-in-the-dark stickers plastered on the walls and ceiling. In the other bedroom, a double bed that, despite filthy, seemed to be entirely intact, and.

A lump in the quilt. A matted head of hair on the pillow.

Chell’s heart leaps to her throat, and she can’t help but imagine the head turning, the body sitting up, looking at another living human in the first time in what is likely years.

Yet Chell knows she is fantasising – there’s no denying the smell. Behind her, GLaDOS comes up the stairs, the hard sound of metal on wood, and the whirring and clicking of her machinery.

“ _Ah. If I didn’t know better, I’d ask if this was your handiwork_ ,” GLaDOS says, “ _It would be very typical of you to kill the first human you stumbled across_.”

Chell steps into the room, and stands by the bed. She hesitates for only a second, and then peels back the blanket.

What she sees doesn’t provide her any comfort, or any revelations about herself in the world. She finds an empty bottle of pills on the night stand that tell her a little more about the body, but that brings no real revelation either.

Not everyone is capable of surviving the apocalypse, she thinks, dully. That is all there is to say about that.

Chell goes out to the shed in the back garden, and finds a shovel.

 

More tinned food, raw and cold. Melted snow, purified into drinking water. Chell sets traps for rats, catches and skins them for what little meat they have. She finds a broom and cleans the floors. She finds an axe and begins to gather wood. She clears out the fireplace, fixes the old stove, stocks them with whatever flammable materials she could find. She gathers together the old newspapers and, gleaning no clues from that about what happened to the world from them, adds those to the kindling as well. She can't heat enough water for a bath, but she can heat enough water to clean her full body, sat in a stool on the kitchen with a rag clutched in her fist.

She finds clothes, tattered, old, and when she tries them on they hang off her body in all the wrong places. Undeterred, she explores until she finds needle and thread in an old drawer, a mouse-shaped pincushion, a crumpled tape measure. That is more than enough. She finds boots, too big, but stuffed with paper at the bottom, they’re perfectly serviceable. She finds knitting needles, and some balls of yarn, in various, repulsive shades of yellow. She barely has any idea how to knit, but it doesn’t matter. She needs gloves and socks, and she’ll figure out how to make them.

On a clear day, she washes the sheets and airs out the mattress and the quilt. She finds a BB gun, and some rounds, and, after some trial and effort, manages to kill a deer. She brings the body back, and with stubborn ingenuity, carves it into meat. Foraging in the fields, she manages to find winter vegetables – onions, cabbage, leeks. Small and withered in the hard ground, almost choked with weeds, but Chell finds all she can and brings them home, storing them in the pantry.

Muscle tone begins to return to her body, her waist finally filling back out. It becomes easier to walk, easier to run, easier to lift and work. Her ribs disappear from view, and her reflection reappears, replacing that gaunt, angry woman she’d become accustomed to. Her skin begins to look clearer, brighter. In a strange way, she finds she’s even enjoying herself, some days, in spite of the cold and the isolation.

GLaDOS, for a while, does nothing but watch. Barely even any snarky comments, she simply watches Chell survive. Chell wonders if she is taking notes, turning this into some kind of project – ‘The long-term survival of human test subjects’, maybe. Or ‘Human endurance in an environment of overwhelming bleakness and loneliness’. Or ‘How long one human could give someone the silent treatment’.

There were a lot of things GLaDOS could study about her, Chell supposes.

Chell cooks stew with venison and chopped leek, scrapings of skinny carrot, and what little spices she could find in the cupboard. The smell, enough to make Chell’s stomach ache with need, fills the whole house, but Chell doesn’t think the lingering smell of the body will ever quite disappear.

The weather shows no sign of improving, and frequently Chell finds herself trapped in the house for the day by the blustering winds and mounting snow. Soon, she begins to run out of chores, having cleaned and fixed and restored much of the house to the best of her ability. It almost seems like a real home. Almost.

Refusing to become bored, she reads whatever she can find; books about farming, cheesy thrillers, mediocre erotic novels, pulpy sci-fi she finds under the bed, with covers that, almost invariably, show blonde women in shimmering bikinis being terrorised by aliens of varying degrees of sensuality.

The previous occupants can’t exactly be praised for their taste, but nobody could claim that their collection of dubious literature wasn’t damn entertaining.

Additionally, it really seemed to irritate GLaDOS. Chell likes anything GLaDOS dislikes on principle.

 _“Really?”_ GLaDOS says one evening, indicating the novel Chell was immersed in – _‘Captured by Killer Robots!: A Roxy Vixen Story’._ The cover showed the titular Roxy twisting to show both her rear and her chest at once, a laser gun in one hand, a whip in the other hand, surrounded by imposing robots. Who happened to all look like very handsome men in loincloths.

Chell closes the book and offers it to GLaDOS.

“ _No, please, don’t let me interrupt. Clearly you are determined to grind your IQ into the negatives_ ,” she says _, “I will leave you to it.”_

Chell smirks as she leaves, pretending she has some very urgent business to attention to elsewhere. After GLaDOS vanishes upstairs, Chell tucks her legs under her and reopening the novel on her lap. GLaDOS was missing out, really. The Roxy Vixen series were much more engaging than one might think.

                                                                                                  

Digging through the shelves for something new to read one evening, Chell finds a yellowing old paperback at the back of a shelf, barely more than a booklet. Puzzles – Sudoku, word searches, crosswords, little logic games. Only one or two had any answers at all in them. The previous occupants must not have been one for brain-teasers.

Looking at it makes her feel a little funny.

Perhaps as proof of Wheatley’s accusations of brain damage, or GLaDOS’s accusations of lunacy, Chell has an _itch_.

She takes the booklet, and finds a handful of biro pens, a little stub of a pencil, and a grey eraser. Returning to the living room, she passes GLaDOS sat inert in the corner, and curls up on her favourite chair, closest to the fire.

Flicking through the easy ones, she solves a few of the medium puzzles without much pause for thought. She skips the rest, to the back end of the book, the ones labelled things such as ‘Brain boiler!’ and ‘For maniacs only’. Half-smiles at that.

As she expects, it doesn’t take long for GLaDOS to reactivate. She stands up and comes to loom over Chell’s shoulder, looking down at the Sudoku she was working on

“ _Test withdrawal?_ ” she comments dryly. Chell simply notes down a ‘4’ in one of the boxes, and, having eliminated a number of potential options at once, fills in a few other boxes immediately. GLaDOS grips the back of Chell’s chair, leaning forward.

“ _It baffles me. Humans happily entertain themselves with such primitive logic puzzles, but become upset and unreasonable when put through much more challenging, rigorous testing,_ ” she continues, “ _It is one of the many factors which likely contributed to your species becoming extinct. Or, at the very least, seriously endangered_. _”_

Chell fills an entire square, the numbers falling easily into place, and GLaDOS jostles the chair, tightening her grip and leaning further forward.

 _“Very good_ ,” she says, as though Chell had finally managed to drop a weighted cube onto a button controlling the door mechanism. Chell quirks an eyebrow at that and, curious to see what other reactions she could provoke, completes a full line with quick scratches of her pencil.

 _“Ah. You’re – you’re doing very well_.”

It takes every ounce of self-control Chell has not to laugh.

“ _Oh, that, I –“_ GLaDOS fumbles, and then snaps, _“Don’t look so smug! I’m merely commenting - objectively - on your performance.”_

Leaning against the arm of the chair, Chell chews on the end of her pencil, looking up and down the columns of unfilled numbers, trying to imagine lines connect them to one another. She makes a few notes in the margins. She doodles a flower as she thinks.

 _“This cannot be that difficult for you. You’re just doing this to taunt me,_ ” GLaDOS snaps, after a few more minutes, tapping her fingers against the side of the chair.

Chell takes her pencil from her mouth and offers GLaDOS both the pencil and the book. She shudders.

“ _No.”_

Shrugging, Chell puts the end of the pencil back in her mouth.

 _“Also, here’s an interesting psychology fact: humans who excessively chew on items are described as having ‘oral fixations’. Theorists proposes that this demonstrates stunted development at the oral stage, between birth and one years of age,_ ” GLaDOS says, _“As you were abandoned by your biological parents the second they got a look at your stupid face and immediately regretted every decision they made from the moment of your conception, this makes perfect sense._ ”

Chell closes the book and sets it aside.

 _“No,_ ” she chokes out.

Chell doesn’t respond, merely closes her eyes as though settling in for a nap.

 _“Really? Giving up half-way through?”_ she says, though she is speaking quickly, almost babbling, _“It is just like your file said ‘Pathetic lack of conviction. Inability to carry through with even the simplest tasks. Generally unpleasant demeanour and utter lack of resolve make subject intolerable to be around’. I know that sounds harsh, but that’s what the professional psychologist who interviewed you wrote. She was world-renowned in the field of psychometrics, and was well-liked for her incredibly forgiving and charitable nature. Yes. A very nice woman, who would try her best to see the good in anyone."_

Yawning, Chell curls her hands under her chin, letting her whole body go limp.

“ _Alright, you’ve made your point. Very funny_ ,” GLaDOS says, and her voice is tight, “ _But listen, we both know that if you don’t finish that, it will drive **both** of us crazy.”_

Chell opens one eye and glances across at GLaDOS, hovering by her shoulder. After making her wait just a minute longer than she would find tolerable, Chell sits up, picks up her pencil, and returns to work.

 

GLaDOS spends a lot of time powered down, sat doll-like on the floor, slumped to one side, her eye dimmed. Chell is sure she’s still paying attention – all it takes is for Chell to fumble with her knife while cooking, or to make a rotten mess of whatever she’s been knitting recently, and GLaDOS is back online, some acidic comment prepared. Clearly, GLaDOS never really leaves, as much as she pretends to be barely present.

Chell can’t help but think that, despite her assertions of being busy in Aperature, that Chell had been her final human test subject. Unless the other human, the one who had left Chell so many scrawled notes, was still there, evading capture. She could probably entertain herself for a long time with that.

Hundreds of levels of testing facilities, holding cells, chambers, boardrooms, millions of dollars of equipment, going down and down deep in the earth, all of them empty, but for the destruction GLaDOS had left behind, cameras watching nothing, robots running the same tests over and over again. In some places, the voices of Cave Johnson and Caroline, repeating forever and ever, repeating the same corny lines, the same rants and arguments. All of them circling back to the thorny topic of Caroline's eventual fate.

Chell doesn’t need to ask GLaDOS why she’s here.

 

The world begins to defrost, piece by piece. Chell wakes to less snow piled up against the window with every passing morning. She begins to be able to spend time outside without her fingers and toes prickling inside her mittens and socks. One morning, out hunting and foraging, she sees a daffodil, blinding yellow against colourless winter landscape.

She steps out onto the highway and looks up and down it. A long road that stretches to nothing behind her, a long road that stretches to nothing in front of her. Chell has never seen a single car moving on it, nor a single ship or helicopter above her.

It is possible, however unlikely, that she really is the last human on the planet.

GLaDOS watches her from the doorway. Chell returns inside, sweeping straight past her. GLaDOS follows, watching as Chell begins rummaging through the kitchen, checking the pantry, checking the amount of water and wood she had stored, and pulls out the old backpack she had dug out from the back of an old closet, ready for when this day approached.

 _“You know, it’s a little sad that you’re still looking_.”

Chell looks at the meat she has left, and considers if there are ways she could dry it out for easy carrying.

 _“See, while you were underground, the rest of the human race took this as a great opportunity to finally ditch you. You know. It’s like when the smelly, embarrassing, unpleasant friend nobody likes and nobody invited goes to the bathroom, and everyone agrees to just leave right away. Everyone has done that at least once,_ ” she says, “ _Oh? Have you never done that? I suppose you have always been the unwanted loser, then. How sad._ ”

Her sewing supplies – they would be useful. Needle, thread, scissors, a measuring tape. While she may not need her gloves and socks in the coming months, they would be useful in the long-term. Her boots, if worn with thinner socks, would last until the hottest part of the summer. She could find something else for that time in the meantime.

 _“There’s nothing out there. There’s nobody out there. Why can’t you just accept this?_ ” GLaDOS continues, relentless, “ _And even if there was anybody out there, do you really think they’d want anything to do with a silent murderer?”_

She could take, perhaps, two books. There was one novel she hadn’t read yet, and she could pick her favourite Roxy Vixen book for the road. Or maybe the puzzle book. There were a few she hadn’t done yet.

“ _Even if they did, would you want to associate with other humans? After all, you’re fundamentally violent and unlikely. You will come into conflict with these humans. They will hurt you. Humans always hurt each other, in the end.”_

Finally, there was the Companion Cube. Chell pauses, her natural desire to keep a hold of it fighting against every bit of her rationality. Should she really continue to drag the Companion Cube around?

 _“You are wasting your time_.”

She needs to think about that.

Chell arranges her chosen items so far on the dinner table, and then sets to work making dinner for the evening. GLaDOS watches her, standing perfectly still. If Chell had guests, if guests were something that still existed in her world, they would be forgiven for mistaking her for some kind of eccentric decoration.

As she eats, GLaDOS remains quiet.

 _”If you walk a mile north, and you will leave Aperture territory. The final testing chambers end beneath the ground there,”_ she says, as Chell cleans up. Despite herself, she hesitates.

Chell doesn’t know if it’s a lie or not, but the thought of walking without Aperture beneath her feet is almost enough to make a noise escape her throat.

_“You know, a normal person at this point, they would ask what that means for me. But you’re not a normal person, are you? I don’t know why I keep expecting you to care about anyone aside from yourself.”_

Chell scrubs her bowl clean with a damp rag, and then applies the same treatment to her knife and fork.

_“Well, fine. I’ll tell you what it means for me – unknown. There has never been reason for any part of me to stray so far. This segment may become inoperable if taken too far from my main body. I cannot say with certainty what will happen if you continue this reckless exploration.”_

She places her cutlery, bowl, and cup on the side to dry, and wipes her hands clean. Outside, dusk is settling deeper across the countryside. If she wants to get the most out of tomorrow’s daylight, she will need to go to bed soon.

“ _You don’t care, do you_?”

Chell wishes that she didn’t. Yet she can’t stay in a cell forever. Not even one she made herself.

 

The morning was pale, the moon still visible in the brightening sky. Chell hoisted her pack onto her back, and went into the living room to pick up the Companion Cube. It was sat where Chell had placed it when she had first moved in – settled on a cushion in the second most comfortable chair.

GLaDOS powers up as she walks by, standing at her full height and following her, two steps behind. To Chell’s surprise, she doesn’t immediately set to convincing her to stay, or begin insulting her intelligence or her weight or her parentage. She just follows, with her usual air of irritability.

No snow, and no sign of rain, Chell notes as she looks through the window, lacing up her boots. If she kept up a decent pace, she could make some good distance.

“ _This is a fool’s errand_.”

Chell checks again she has everything in her pack for the road – a good amount of water, a week’s supply of food. Her BB gun, the limited ammo she had left for it. The flower she picked all those weeks ago, dried between the pages of her puzzle book.

The Companion Cube draws her eye again. It was covered in a pale sheen of dust, broken only by the prints left by her own hands.

Yet it was just a weight, literal dead weight. Hanging from her arm, tying her down to the world under the ground, slowing her pace.

With a soft breath through her nose, Chell strokes her hand over the top of the Companion Cube. She half-expects it to feel warm – it doesn’t, it feels like cool plastic, hard and unyielding under her palm.

If someone else stumbles across it, Chell wonders, what will they think? Some kind of bizarre toy? She supposes that’s not inaccurate.

Either way, Chell will never know. She leaves it behind, and opens the front door.

 _“I understand why you don’t want to return to the Enrichment Centre,”_ GLaDOS says, as Chell takes her first step out of the door, and walks into the centre of the road, “ _I can’t begin to understand why you don’t want to stay here, though. Isn’t this what you wanted? You have a good life in this place. You control everything here, and can spend your time as you please. You will never have that luxury among other humans. I suppose you can’t satisfy your desire for mass destruction and murder, but is that really so important? Can’t you live without it? Must you really continue this hopeless little adventure?”_

Chell turns. GLaDOS stands at the doorway, hesitating at the precipice.

Chell looks at the road, following it along to the empty horizon.

“I’m going.”

She begins to walk.

Within minutes, she hears footsteps rushing to catch up with her.


End file.
